White evangelicals love Trump because he’s delivering what his core constituency craves: the real possibility of a white supremacist male-dominated Christian theocracy. Judging by Trump’s first 100 days he’s off to a resoundingly failed legislative start. Trump is however a resounding success at one thing: he’s delivering for the religious right.

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One of the most extreme of the religious right leaders is Jerry Falwell Jr., the Liberty U college president. He’s the son of an old friend of mine Jerry Falwell Sr., who used to invite me to speak at his church and school before I fled the religious right. Back in my days as a religious right leader and sidekick to my evangelist father Francis Schaeffer, in the 1970s and 1980s, I helped Jerry Falwell Sr., spread his message of hate. Thus Trump’s rise as the New Great White Hope of my old misguided theocratic comrades strikes a personal note with me. (I tell the story of my flight from the religious right and change of mind in my memoir CRAZY FOR GOD: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back. In a new ABC interview Falwell berated moderate Republicans, who he said “make my blood boil.” Falwell Jr., enthusiastically praised Trump’s first 100 days of office. “I think evangelicals have found their dream president,” Falwell said in an interview with “Justice With Judge Jeanine” on Fox News. Here are some other ways the “dream” lives on for evangelicals:

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Closing the door to the “Other” (in other words to brown, black, Muslim and Hindus)

White evangelicals love Trump for lots of reasons but one reason stands out: many of them are racists. Trump is too.

The history of the “Christian school” movement is the history of white flight and segregation. Jerry Falwell Sr., for example, started Lynchburg Christian Academy in 1967, when his town’s public schools integrated. Because Brown did not apply to private schools, institutions like Falwell’s could practice segregation while still receiving federal tax benefits. But all of this changed with the series of Supreme Court decisions in the late ’60s and early ’70s that forced public schools to integrate and declared racially discriminatory private schools ineligible for tax-exempt status.

Thus it was no surprise when Franklin Graham, son of the famed preacher Billy Graham, and leader of the charity Samaritan’s Purse, delivered a prayer from the inaugural podium of a white supremacist president. Graham defends Trump’s religion-based attempted ban of Muslims. “It’s not a biblical command for the country to let everyone in who wants to come, that’s not a Bible issue,” Graham told The Huffington Post.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and the political strategist who spearheaded voter turnout efforts for Trump among right-wing evangelicals, called the executive order “an entirely prudent move.”

Trump said to CBN’s Brody that in the “extreme vetting” to be set in motion as a result of the order, persecuted Christians seeking asylum would be given priority over other persecuted people — a move whose constitutionality is highly questionable.

And Trump’s education secretary Betsy DeVos, is all about deconstructing public schools in favor of private religious schools- including the many all-white schools set up specifically (though often secretly so) to “save” white children the Other.

Packing the Administration with Far-Right Religious Activists

The Religious Right was thrilled when Trump selected right-wing figures to lead government agencies, like Jeff Sessions as attorney general, Tom Price to head the Department of Health and Human Services, Ben Carson to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Betsy DeVos to run the Education Department. Sessions, Price, and Carson are longtime supporters of the Religious Right’s agenda, and DeVos and her family have been among the biggest funders of conservative causes. Trump’s choice for army secretary, unsurprisingly, also has an adamantly anti-LGBTQrecord.

Re-instituting the Global Gag Rule

Trump restored the global gag rule, which prevents foreign nongovernmental organizations from receiving U.S. assistance if they provide, publicly support or refer women to abortion services. The policy, first enforced by Ronald Reagan, was dropped under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Attacking Planned Parenthood

While Congress has yet to pass legislation defunding the group entirely, it did pass a bill, with Mike Pence’s help, that allows states to “block patients with low incomes who rely on Title X from getting care from reproductive health care providers, including Planned Parenthood.” Trump said that he is still committed to defunding Planned Parenthood. At the March for Life, Vice President Pence wasn’t the only member of Trump’s administration to rally the troops. Presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway, was greeted with cheers when she introduced herself as “a mother, a wife, a Catholic and counselor to the president of the United States.”

Trump just put antiabortion activist Teresa Manning in charge of the Title X program, which provides family planning funding for poor Americans or those without health insurance. Manning’s selection as the Department of Health and Human Services’ deputy assistant secretary for population affairs marks the second agency appointment approved by religious right leaders. Trump also just picked Charmaine Yoest, former president of Americans United for Life, as the department’s assistant secretary of public affairs. Manning has argued that “contraception doesn’t work,” to oversee a federal family planning program for low-income Americans. Manning has said she opposes federal family planning funding, and she has a long history of making false claims about birth control and women’s health.

Weakening Non-Discrimination Protections

According to Ken Blackwell, the transition team’s domestic policy aide, Trump still plans to issue an executive order on religious liberty that is likely to undercut nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people. A large group of Republicans in Congress has called on the president to implement an order that would, according to USA Today, “scale back Obama-era protections for gays and lesbians.”

Trump has already signed an executive order that makes it easier for federal contractors to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. The administration has also taken steps to reducethevisibility of the LGBTQ community in data collection.

The religious right shares Trump’s hatred for a critical free-thinking media

As the Washington Postreported reviving a theme that Trump brought up on the campaign trail, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said last Sunday that the administration has “looked at” potential changes to libel laws that would make it easier for Trump and his family to sue news organizations that criticize them. “I think it’s something that we’ve looked at,” Priebus told Jonathan Karl on ABC’s “This Week.” “How that gets executed or whether that goes anywhere is a different story,” he added.

Priebus criticized “articles out there that have no basis or fact” and alluded to reports on cable news stations about contacts between Trump campaign officials and Russia. Priebus said the media needs “to be more responsible with how they report the news.”

Trump has threatened legal action against news organizations before. As a candidate, he warned that he would sue the New York Times after the newspaper printed stories about unwanted sexual advances Trump was accused of making toward several women. Evangelicals want the press curbed. Free speech scares evangelicals as they try to brainwash children into accepting their fictions about everything from evolution to what makes people gay. Like Trump, evangelicals see the media as the enemy preaching “fake news.” They despise the media’s “fake” climate change claims, fake gay rights, fake science on the Earth’s age, fake views about women’s rights and fake ideas about the equality of the races. Evangelicals view themselves as victims of facts. They regard facts themselves (say that the Bible is obviously a collection of myths) as a threat from liberals to “take our children away.”

Guns, guns and more guns… what white evangelicals really love crave

Falwell is a big NRA fan and has urged his student body to carry loaded weapons on campus. His actual words as he asked students to buy and carry guns on campus were: “In case Muslims come here.” “I’ve always thought, if more good people had concealed carry permits then we could end those Muslims before they walked in killing … Let’s teach them a lesson if they ever show up here.”

NRA membership, areas with the most guns and maps of Bible Belt white supremacy movements all overlap. So when Trump spoke to the National Rifle Association’s annual leadership, the first sitting president since Ronald Reagan to do so, he was mostly talking to white “Bible-believing” religious right followers as he proclaimed, “We have news that you’ve been waiting for … a long time… The eight-year assault on your Second Amendment freedoms has come to a crashing end.”

War on the environment

White evangelicals reject the fact of man-made climate change. They are thrilled Trump is rolling back protection of the environment. To them talk about climate change is all lies by evil people. To the evangelicals the environment is “Their” (liberals’) issue. “They all live in Washington DC, or New York” the cry goes up. And as a Real Christian, if you even think about caring for creation, you are on the slippery slope of pantheism. Trump and the religious right are a perfect anti-Planet Earth fit. From the evangelical view only “globalists” want to do anything about the planet. Who cares about the planet? America First! Anyway, Jesus will come back before the oceans rise!

Conclusion

Add to the list above Trump’s promise that theocracy is okay with him, in fact American evangelical Sharia law is fine. His administration will Trump says, “totally destroy” a law banning political activity by churches. Jerry Falwell Jr., is heading up a new education task force for Trump. A Liberty University spokesman told USA Today that Falwell, agreed to head up the task force after declining to be Trump’s nominee for education secretary.

Everything the religious right has been fighting for over the last 50 years, from re-segregating schools to rolling back women’s rights, to closing the borders to other races and religions, to shoving gay women and men back into the closet is coming to pass. Trump is the religious right white supremacist’s wet dream. The rest of us are in another sort of dream: the nightmare of watching American democracy and freedom replaced with evangelical sharia law.

Schaeffer, How do you define “theocracy”? How would that work in the US with the type of government we have? Has there ever been a theocracy in the US since the Constitution was ratified? If so, when was that, and what were the characteristics of it?

Its been a long time since that happened. I don’t think a similar thing would be possible now. And, I don’t know any Christian who wants the government to force people to attend church, or force people to say they believe the Bible. And I’m around Christians a lot.

Thank you Frank for writing such truths. The “others” have been brainwashed into believing all the bull manure that evangelicals spew; misleading their followers into an indoctrination opposite of Christ’s message. It’s one of love and cooperation. With all the vinegar that flows from their very being, what fly or bee would be attracted to their nest? Jesus’s whole message was “Love God & love your neighbor.” I’ve also been raised in a Christian fundamentalist home & I’m 70 yrs old now. Thank God I’ve read & comprehended the Bible enough to know the meanings. My parents followed your parents through their ministry. My parents became confused & angry. I appreciate your enlightenment. Well done.

It is interesting to me and dad that many of the church goers in my parent’s circle have children who have drug issues, have committed suicide, and even have felony records. In all cases these kids were raised in the church. Just today I read a post from a mother whose son would have been 48 today but died of a drug overdose at 43. She stressed that he had been raised to serve God and love Jesus. It bothers me to read this and I have to sit on my hands to avoid responding..

It is interesting to me that many of the church goers in my parent’s circle have children who have drug issues, have committed suicide, and even have felony records. In all cases these kids were raised in the church. Just today I read a post from a mother whose son would have been 48 today but died of a drug overdose at 43. She stressed that he had been raised to serve God and love Jesus. It bothers me to read this and I have to sit on my hands to avoid responding..

Dear Frankie, I sure don’t blame you for being mad, and I agree that you could find evangelicals that fit every one of your stereotypes here. I have given up calling myself Evangelical out of shame for white American Evangelicals’ sin and stupidity. However, I feel obliged to point out that there are many Evangelical initiatives to care for creation. There are many of us pro-lifers who understand more and more that we need to address such things as women’s rights, health, poverty, and birth control access. In fact, I don’t think that you would dislike many of the new Evangelical pro-life movements. Many of my Evangelical friends participated in the marches for Science and climate. And very many of us did not vote for Trump, but rather found ourselves leaving the Republican party, as did my husband, and voting for Hillary Clinton, which we never would have guessed we’d do. Please don’t paint us, then, with the same brush. There are major splits among us, now, and I’d much rather ally with you than argue with you. I had to laugh a couple of weeks ago in church when I informed a fellow parishioner that I was now trolling Franklin Graham on Facebook. Turns out, he’s trolling Franklin on Twitter. Take care, and God bless.